Word: dingoes
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...Dingo is a dirty word in the Australian vocabulary. As an adjective, it connotes extreme cowardice. As a noun, it refers to a species of wild dog, usually yellow and about the size of a German shepherd, whose bite is worse than its bark.* In the 19th century, before any organized attempts to eradicate the dingoes, they killed about 500,000 sheep a year, making them Australia's public enemy No. 1. As late as the 1920s, Anatomist Frederic Wood-Jones expressed the national attitude toward the killers. "To say anything in favor of the hated wild...
Despite that hatred, some brave Australians are now coming to the defense of the wild dog. "The dingo is a magnificent animal," says Film Maker Lionel Hudson, who praises it for its intelligence and highly developed senses of sight, smell and hearing. Hudson advocates domesticating the dingo and putting it to useful work-tracking down lost people and criminals or sniffing out drugs in baggage. In Victoria, a group is seeking government permission to breed and show the species...
Pyrrhic Victory. Most other Australians still detest the dingo. They have spent about $330 million since the turn of the century to eradicate the animal. They hunt the wild dogs from planes, bait sheep carcasses with poison, pay a bounty of as much as $13 per dingo scalp. They have even built-and maintain-a 5,402-mile-long wire-mesh fence that zigzags across most of the island continent, protecting the nation's 148 million sheep from the predatory dingo. Even so, says Brian Neill, supervisor of the New South Wales Wild Dog Destruction Board...
...range and tracking station, used for guiding American astronauts, glow in the night. To the east, the moonlit rails turn molten in the Popsicle-or-ange sunrise. This is the time of day a kangaroo likes to lick the dew off the steel track. Or when a yellow-eyed dingo, Australia's coyote, will stand its ground and stare sourly at the train while a spindly-legged emu, the local version of an ostrich, will try to outrun the 3,300-h.p. diesel express...
When it came to name-calling, Whitlam gave more than he got. In Australia's rambunctious House of Representatives, where debate is often a euphemism for denunciation, Whitlam has described Liberal Cabinet ministers variously as "bumptious bastard," "queen," "dingo" (Australia's version of a coyote) and something that Hansard recorded as "runt" (which at least rhymed with the actual word). He once became so enraged with one Liberal minister that he dumped a glass of water on him. That minister was Paul Hasluck, who later became Governor General of Australia and, in an antipodean twist of fate, found...